Collectors/Distillers, or how we distill essential oils.

We haven't always been collectors/distillers.

My father Claudio worked as an advertising photographer until he was about 60.
His partner Benedetta taught at a Montessori nursery school.
I come from the world of events and music.
When my father decided to embark on the world of essential oils, it wasn’t easy to become good distillers.
There is no real literature on the subject and what little there is is often imprecise if not downright wrong.

First, let's briefly look at the distillation process.

The method we use is the oldest known and dates back to the year 1000, when the Persian doctor and philosopher Avicenna invented the still for steam distillation. (or at least this is the most widely accepted theory) and described the properties of the oils.
The process is mechanically very simple.
A burner transforms the water contained in a tank into a stream of steam which is introduced through a pipe into a second tank filled with the plant to be distilled.
The steam passes through the plant, dragging the essential oil molecules with it, at which point the steam is directed into a “condenser” tube which returns the water and oil to a liquid state.
Density separates the two elements, the oil comes to the surface because it is lighter and we collect it thanks to another simple but ingenious invention called the Florentine vase.
Put like that, it seems little more complicated than making a cup of tea.

In practice, however, it is anything but simple.

First of all, you need to know that out of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of plant species, only about 400 plants can produce an essential oil.
We practice “natural” agriculture, that is, we do not give plants any medicine, not even those approved by the Organic specification, this is because plants produce oils, not for us to bottle them and use them by us humans, but to carry out some essential activities for the survival of the plant itself, in fact the molecules of essential oils can be used to keep insects away, or defend themselves from bacteria, viruses and fungi, the plant can attract pollinators and even establish a “dialogue” with higher animals like us inducing a certain behavior (calm, excite, etc.), essential oils can be healing, healing and many other things that we humans probably still don't know.
For this reason we are convinced that giving a semi-wild and “uncomfortable” life to our plants allows us to obtain complete essential oils.
Furthermore, each plant has its own “magic” moment in which it can produce good oil. Let's be clear, the oil is almost always inside the plant, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's good or healthy.
There are times of the year when distilling a plant means obtaining a dangerous oil, and others when it is simply not good.
You have to be careful to collect the right parts of the plant, avoiding those that can contaminate the final result.
It can also happen that during the “magic” period it rains all the time, the oil that is obtained from rotten plants is not good and therefore it is postponed to the following year, because agriculture, the real one, is like that.
We have become quite good at understanding when and how to distill plants, but in any case we collaborate with the University of Pharmacology of Milan to analyze our oils and thus guarantee their total non-toxicity.

Once distilled the oil is not ready.

Or rather, not all of them.
Citrus fruits, for example, are ready-to-go oils, obtained, most of the time, by pressing; when you were the nicest in class and sprayed mandarin peels in the eyes of your classmates, you were actually extracting essential oils.
The counterpoint to this immediacy is that they are volatile oils and after four years they lose their freshness.
Other oils need to mature, and often, when distilled, they have completely different odors from the original plant.
They are left to settle for months, some even years.
The olfactory exercise that this maturation forces us to do is arduous, every now and then we open the cupboard and smell, we evaluate the changes and any stability obtained in a real organoleptic examination.
This too took some time to understand and make systematic.

However, essential oils present an additional problem: the market is saturated with low-cost products.

The marketing of low-cost oils can have various explanations, the first is that they are synthetic products recreated by composing some molecules in a chemical laboratory.
Another is not paying much attention to the distillation processes, forcing the plant to produce a lot thanks to high temperatures in a short time.
In the first case, you are not buying something natural but a chemical product, if you want to perfume your wardrobe it can be fine, if you intend to use it for aromatherapy or worse in food or drinks we do not recommend it.
In the second case you are buying an incomplete oil.
The oil obtained half an hour after lighting the fire under the distiller is completely different from the one obtained after 5/6 hours or the next day.
This is because the molecules inside the plant have different weights and bonds that are more or less easy to break.
A long distillation at low temperatures produces a complete oil with all the molecules of the plant and without the unpleasant "cooked" smell.

There are plants that give a lot of oil like lavender (by a lot we mean a maximum of 5/6% compared to the quantity of the fresh plant), there are others that are particularly stingy, just think that to obtain a litre of rose essential oil you need 7 tons of petals collected before dawn and distilled during the day.
The complexity of our work stimulates and excites us every day, every year we learn something new and are amazed by the diversity of nature.
We love sharing our knowledge with others and try to answer your questions as much as possible.
Feel free to suggest any blog topics.

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